Rising: Neon Indian

Twenty-one year-old Mexico-born, Texas-raised Alan Palomo is a restless fellow. Neon Indian is his third new musical identity in two years, following the short-lived Ghosthustler and the ongoing VEGA. But, as opposed to VEGA's glossy synth-pop, Neon Indian is decidedly lo-fi and ramshackle. "Neon Indian is like VEGA's evil twin in the sense that it's made up of these strange musical and emotional impulses," Palomo said in a recent interview.

A gauzy combination of Buggles-style 1980s pop, video game soundtracks, and cheeseball elevator music, Neon Indian songs like "Deadbeat Summer" and "Should Have Taken Acid With You" are effervescent, goofy, and achingly nostalgic. Kind of like MGMT on a ramen budget-- and with less face paint.

A sometime film student, Palomo conceived Neon Indian as an audio/visual endeavor, and enlisted high school friend and artist Alicia Scardetta to help with its eyeball attack. Live projections and online teaser videos are set to lead up to the October 13 release of the project's debut LP, Psychic Chasms, via Lefse.

Palomo took some time out while preparing the Neon Indian live show-- which will make its debut at Colorado's Monolith Festival September 13-- to chat with us about the pitfalls of lo-fi, (not) taking acid, and a particularly disturbing and bloody Nintendo game:

Pitchfork: How did the Neon Indian project start?

Alan Palomo: It began with the song "Should Have Taken Acid With You". During holiday break last year, [Neon Indian visual artist] Alicia [Scardetta] and I were supposed to get together and spend an afternoon on acid, but it fell through. I felt really bad about it so I wrote this song and sent it to her and figured that was that. Then she responded, like, "Wow there's really something to this."

Pitchfork: Did you reschedule the acid meet up?

AP: Not yet.

Pitchfork: There's a lot of music coming out now that uses this really lo-fi aesthetic to get its point across. I think the technique fits on Psychic Chasms, but it can seem like a shortcut to actual songwriting sometimes, too.

AP: I'd be lying if I said lo-fi was a completely gimmick-free genre. It's an old trick to just cover songs in reverb and distortion-- one I've been guilty of in the past. But there's also a lot of really amazing music that's written as a result of that. If you heard Daniel Johnston's "Story of an Artist" with an 18-piece band it might not have had the same effect. Someone like Ariel Pink speaks to me directly because he can still make this incredibly emotional music that's devoid of studio assistance.

That said, I do have some ambivalence towards lo-fi where it stands right now. There's so much stuff coming out on blogs and I have this impending anxiety as to whether it's going to become another electro disaster. A few weeks ago I was reading this book Transparency of Evil by Jean Baudrillard, and he was talking about how art is becoming this speculation-based currency and in order to proliferate it has to reference itself faster and faster. I remember thinking, "Oh Christ, this sounds exactly like the blog world!"

When you have all these micro music genres popping up out of nowhere, it seems like the only way to expand or retain any sort of relevance is to exhaust every possible variation until it implodes like this supernova leaving a residue of hundreds of shit MP3s. I really hope the medium by which someone writes a song isn't the only thing the song has going for it.

Pitchfork: Neon Indian has a distinct sense of longing, even if it's tough to make out what you're saying a lot of the time.

AP: There's definitely a very specific theme in the lyrical content of Psychic Chasms. It's funny, I can always understand the words but I'll play it for someone they'll be like, "Dude, what the fuck did you say?" I have to send my friends the lyrics and they're like, "That's what it means? That's so sad." [laughs] I don't even know if I'll provide a lyric sheet for Psychic Chasms-- I like the idea that everyone draws their own meaning.

Looking back on it, the album came to be this series of snapshots of pivotal moments in relationships that went completely awry. It might seem amateur, but nothing makes better artistic fodder than relationship history for me. When I moved from Denton to Austin last year, I toiled away at my synths most of the time and didn't really hang out with people. It was during this self-reflective phase that I started thinking back to when I was introduced to all these wrong combinations of feelings-- happiness, nostalgia, gut-wrenching anger. I purged a lot of that with this album.

Pitchfork: Some Neon Indian songs remind me of old video game soundtracks. Were you big into gaming as a kid?

AP: I probably bonded more with the Sega Genesis, but I would definitely watch my brother play Nintendo for hours. I remember this one game called Monster Party where this half-man, half-falcon takes you to a planet that looks unusually happy until a strobe light flashes and then everything is drenched in blood and green slime, and there are corpses everywhere. As a kid I was like, "What the fuck is this?"

We're the first string of generations to have our imaginations directly dictated to by video games. I wouldn't be able to imagine what life would be like daydreaming about being a knight as opposed to grabbing a controller and slaying a dragon. As a really young kid it was my vicarious window to the world. It transcends nostalgia.

Pitchfork: How did you originally get into music?

AP: I only started playing a few years ago, but I've always experienced music passively. My dad has been an inadvertent musical influence just because that's how he makes his living-- he had a brief stint in the late 70s and early 80s as a Mexican pop star. I actually sampled some of his stuff for Neon Indian. If you YouTube "Jorge Palomo" you can see a video of a guy who looks like me singing into a mic.

Pitchfork: What are your touring plans for the rest of the year?

AP: I'll be doing gigs back and forth between VEGA and Neon Indian shows from August through December. For Neon Indian, we might do some European shows in some unusual environments. We got an offer to play a fashion show in Paris. [laughs] As apprehensive as I was about something like that, at the same time I'm like, "Dude, haven't you always wanted to play a show with a bunch of supermodels walking around?!"